32 GB Flash Storage Drive Announced 381
Audrius writes to tell us TG Daily is reporting that Samsung has just announced a new 32 GB Flash storage device. The aim of this new solid state disk (SSD) drive is to completely replace the traditional hard drives in many laptops on the market. Some of the advantages offered are the 1.8" form factor, read speeds more than twice that of a normal hard drive, and the promise of 95% less power use.
What about the limited number of writes? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience... (Score:3, Insightful)
In my experience, promised things usually fall flat on their face. Microsoft springs immediately to mind.
And hopefully, Flash drives will replace the current magnetic platter ones. It's kind of odd for one of the most important devices in a computer to be the only moving one (And therefore the most susceptible to damage, especially in laptops).
I'd buy it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Digital Camcorders (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Reliability? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is big news. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to the future (Score:3, Insightful)
Where I see SSDs in laptops being used most. (Score:3, Insightful)
Example: a mechanic using it to interface with a car's OBD port.
He's not going to be writing to the HD a while lot, but you know damned well that it's not going to be treated lightly. 32GB is pleanty large to put and OS and the diagnostic/tuning apps on.
Make that laptop low enough power to plug into a cigarette lighter and you got a nice tool.
Another example: Some geologist needs to take data off of some geophones in the middle of places with names like "Desolation Wilderness". A laptop with a longer battery life and a HD that is going to survive being in a backpack is going to make things alot easier. Hiking out 10 miles to the middle of nowhere isn't something that you want to have to re-do because something broke or you ran out of battery life.
I don't forsee anyone having one at the next LAN party. Though given the number of people with hilarious setups, it could happen. Afterall, who'd buy a 150GB HD that cost $350? (WD Raptor)
Re:Data Integrity (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess we have to reconsider some habits we've got accustomed to if traditional hds are replaced.
Fragmentation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Does fragmentation matter when there are no heads to move?
flash wear-out (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not relevant... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What about the limited number of writes? (Score:3, Insightful)
This will be further enhanced with small, battery backed RAM write cache integral to the device. BBWC is commonplace in storage. Flash storage (eventually it will occur to us that emulating disks isn't useful) will just scale it down to a few hundred kilobytes + tiny battery and some large percentage of writes direct to Flash will not occur. Between the write cache and write balancing you'll get many years of use, and failure predicted by a simple progress bar as the device approaches its write limit.
This will, of course, take about a decade of hashing around with new "standards", including excellent proprietary solutions from Apple that won't go anywhere due to royalties, various bad reimplementations from everyone else that will complicate the market and slow adoption, etc.
Enjoy.
Re:Interesting .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Another level of cache (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fragmentation? (Score:4, Insightful)
You eventually have to consolidate the data of each file. Not nescesarily to sequential blocks, but so files are not sharing blocks.
For flash memory, non-journalled filesystems like Ext2 (mounted -o noatime) may be best. Although that still tries to keep large chunks of files sequential. It might be better to have a non-journalled filesystem that does not pre-allocate inodes and data blocks, but just keeps a free block list and allocates from it in Least-Recently-Used order.
Re: Flash memory that works has a much longer MTBF (Score:2, Insightful)
If you buy a flash drive, fill it with data, and then never write to it again, you can read all you want and it's minimum MTBF will be ~10 years (AFAIK, there's no reason they couldn't last longer, it's just that more testing needs to be done to prove that they will last longer).
Another problem in comparing hard drives and flash drives is based on what kind of environment they're subjected to. Flash drives are usually portable devices that live in pockets, and are subject to static shocks and being plugged/unplugged on a regular basis. hard drives for the most part live in computers where they're protected from the elements and aren't often disconnected, especially not with the power on. In your case, I'd be willing to bet that your flash drives are dying from a failure in the onboard controller (rather than individual cells dying). It might be interesting to purchase a small USB hard drive and compare how long it lasts when subjected to the same environment as your flash drives.
-Mr. Lizard
Re:Digital Camcorders (Score:1, Insightful)
Hell, I think you're a twat for having such an inane irritation such as that. Twat.